Finally — and my tone has a touch of the ‘little girl’ in it, a note of charm — I say: ‘Look, I’m not equipped to criticize it philosophically, but surely this sentence here is a key sentence, the phrase “neither superstructure nor base” — surely that is either completely out of the Marxist canon, a new thought completely, or it’s an evasion. Or simply arrogance.’ (I am relieved that as I go on my tone loses its disarming ‘charm’ and becomes serious, though over-excited.) Rex blushes, turns the pamphlet over and over and says: ‘Yes, I must admit that sentence did strike me as rather …’ There is a silence and then George says bluffly: ‘All this theoretical stuff is just over my head.’ And now we all look uncomfortable — except for George. A lot of comrades are now using this rough-and-ready attitude, a sort of comfortable philis-tinism. It has become so much a part of George’s personality now, however, that he is quite happy about it. I find myself thinking: Well, it’s justified — he does so much good work for the Party, if that’s his way of staying in it, then … Without actually taking a decision that we are not going to discuss the pamphlet, we let it be forgotten; and talk about general matters, communist politics anywhere. Russia, China, France, our own country. All the time I am thinking: Not once does one of us say: something is fundamentally wrong; yet the implication of what we say amounts to that. I can’t stop thinking about this phenomenon — that when two of us meet, our discussions are on a totally different level than when there are three people present. Two people, and it is two persons, from a critical tradition, discussing politics as people not communists would discuss them. (By people not communists I mean that they wouldn’t be recognized as communists, except for the jargon, by an outsider listening in.) But more than two, and a different spirit altogether is present. This is particularly true of what is said about Stalin. Although I am quite prepared to believe that he is mad and a murderer (though remembering always what Michael says — that this is a time when it is impossible to know the truth about anything), I like to hear people use that tone of simple, friendly respect for him. Because if that tone were to be thrown aside, something very important would go with it, paradoxically enough, a faith in the possibilities of democracy, of decency. A dream would be dead — for our time, at least.

The talk became desultory, I offered to make tea, everyone was pleased that the meeting was going to end. I made tea, and then I remembered a story that was sent to me last week. By a comrade living somewhere near Leeds. When I first read it, I thought it was an exercise in irony. Then a very skilful parody of a certain attitude. Then I realized it was serious — it was at the moment I searched my memory and rooted out certain fantasies of my own. But what seemed to me important was that it could be read as parody, irony or seriously. It seems to me this fact is another expression of the fragmentation of everything, the painful disintegration of something that is linked with what I feel to be true about language, the thinning of language against the density of our experience. However, when I’d made the tea, I said I wanted to read them a story.